Missing Persons Association

Missing Persons Association: A Brief History

The Missing Irish People website (www.missing.ie ) was established in May 2000 by Fr Aquinas Duffy, following the disappearance of his cousin, Limerick Man Aengus Shanahan. In 2001, Mr David Linehan from Cork requested that the details of his missing father be placed on the website. His father was subsequently found deceased by his family. It was shortly after this tragedy that David Linehan and Cormac Cremin and Fr Aquinas Duffy (who continues to run the missing.ie/missing.ws website) and others set about campaigning for a helpline and for better resources for the families of missing people.

A link up of all the families on the website was formed so that we could keep in touch with each other or put people who had someone missing in touch with some of the families. A limited helpline was also set up with an on call paging system. After much campaigning and many media interviews, a state aided helpline for the families of the missing was established by victim support and ran for two and a half years with the help of a grant from the Dept of Justice. It ceased on 31st March 2005 as a result of funding being withdrawn by the Dept of Justice. It is good to report however that in April 2009, Missing in Ireland Support Services (a new organsiation set up to support the families of the missing) succeeded in re-establishing the National Missing Persons Helpline through grant aid and charitable donations. The helpline number which is a local call from anywhere in the Republic of Ireland is 1890-442 552. Their website, www.missingpersons.ie, also carries appeals for people missing from or in Ireland and whose cases have been reported to the Gardai.

The Missing Persons Association was formed in 2002 to bring together groups and people whose aim is to locate missing persons and to highlight the issue of missing persons. The MPA has now become the ‘Cork City Missing Persons’ Search and Recovery’ which has its own rescue boat ‘. (See below). They are available to the families of missing people to offer practical advice and support.

Cork City Missing Persons’ Search and Recovery

Cork City Missing Persons Search And Recovery is a voluntary organisation based in Cork City. We conduct land and water based missing persons searches. Our Services are free of charge and we will respond to call outs from Gardaí, family members of missing persons, web master of www.missing.ie and the National Missing Persons helpline Ireland 1890-442552.

Our group consists of members who are trained in search & recovery and we have been assisting Gardaí and families of missing persons since 2002. We are also aligned to the National Missing Persons Helpline Ireland.

To request our services to search for any missing person, the missing person must first be reported missing to the Gardaí before we can conduct any search. There are no paid people in our group and we are not government funded so we rely on donations from the public through fund raising events that we organise.

We publish our accounts publically on an annual basis on our facebook group page on the first of January each year so you the public know how your money is being used by us to find the people we search for.

We are associated and linked with the official website of Missing Irish People, www.missing.ie, and can offer on request the services of our colleague, Fr Aquinas Duffy, the web master of the website.